PC makers are setting their sights on reducing the amount of time it takes your PC to boot up, reports the New York Times, because users are increasingly impatient about waiting to go about their computing business after hitting that power button.
Hewlett-Packard, Dell and Lenovo are rolling out machines that give people access to basic functions like e-mail and a Web browser in 30 seconds or less. [...] Even Microsoft, whose bloated Windows software is often blamed for sluggish start times, has pledged to do its part in the next version of the operating system, saying on a company blog that "a very good system is one that boots in under 15 seconds." Today only 35 percent of machines running the latest version of Windows, called Vista, boot in 30 seconds or less, the blog notes.
Quick tests with the PC and Mac at my desk show why you might opt out of shutting down at all: my MacBook Pro (2.16GHz, 3GB RAM) made it to the login screen in 38 seconds, but my (admittedly old) PC running Windows XP (2.39GHz, 1GB RAM) took 1 minute, 5 seconds to get there. How about you?Time your computer from boot to login screen, and let us know the results below. (Make sure you don't have auto-login enabled, because then you'll count all the programs that start up automatically, that can add almost a full minute to the time like it does on my Mac.)
What do you do to get around the boot-up wait? Never shut it down, just sleep? Go get coffee? Do your daily affirmations? Make yourself a sandwich? Let us know in the comments.